5 Reasons Why Childish Liberals Love The Hunger Games

Why does the movie The Hunger Games: Catching Fire excite today’s kids so much? Maybe because it plays to their childish views, which in many cases are interwoven with the central thinking of liberalism. Here are five reasons why childish liberals love The Hunger Games.

1) By spoofing yet glamorizing the media, it pretends you can have your cake and eat it too.

The Hunger Games thinks it’s a vicious satire of media-obsessed culture, particularly reality TV shows such as Survivor, which the movies literalize by imagining kids from around the country being brought to the decadent Capitol City to fight each other to the death for the amusement of TV watchers. But that satire has to be lost on the audience, which is attracted to the films for such spectacles as heroine Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) riding a chariot into an arena filled with thousands of screaming fans in an amazing dress that lights on fire for extra wow. Media-saturated kids walk out of the film picturing themselves being treated as superstars for no reason except being randomly selected in a lottery.

What does all this have to do with politics? Liberals who, for instance, keep proposing minimum wage increases or tariffs to keep out foreign competition are forever blasting things that in reality they love and couldn’t live without, like cheap laborers to redo their fancy kitchens or mow their lawns.

2) It thinks hope is a strategy.

In the second movie, Katniss becomes a hero to the downtrodden people, who admire her pluck and form adoring crowds, eventually starting to press her into reluctant service as their savior. Hey, she’s Barack Obama with a bow and arrow!

Liberals get starry-eyed and messiah-bedazzled by political leaders, whereas conservatives take a more practical view of what political figures can and cannot accomplish.

3) It’s condescending to blacks.

White liberals consider themselves stalwart supporters of blacks, but when it comes to policies that harm blacks (like broken inner-city schools and a flood of immigrants that depresses the value of unskilled and working-class Americans), they hastily change the subject to something that does nothing for blacks but does gratify whites’ own sense of moral superiority and goodness: They conduct a witch hunt for racism in every nook of the American psyche.

Similarly, in the Hunger Games movies, blacks aren’t true equals with their own interests. They’re disposable background figures, more like sweet angelic pets or mascots who exist to be friendly helpers, even to the point of sacrificing themselves, so that the white heroes may prosper. That’s why some bloggers deride characters like Rue, Cinna and Thresh as stereotypical “Magical Negroes.”

4) It promotes fatuous Occupy rhetoric.

The Appalachia-like District 12 is full of noble poor people who despise those decadent one-percenters in the Rome-like Capitol City who literally have the underprivileged killed for sport.

This is a clever update of the Marxist idea that “behind every fortune is a great crime” or that if someone is getting rich, he must have robbed or exploited a poor person. In reality, rich people create fortunes by making the world better, brighter or more efficient, and poor people benefit hugely from the innovative genius of billionaires like Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison.

Occupy-Wall-Street liberals are loving the way the film portrays an extraordinary gap between the rich and poor as simply an innate evil. It's a black-and-white view in which there’s no allowance that the rich might have earned their wealth -- they're portrayed simply as lazy and overly indulged oppressors. The poor are shown as the industrious ones.

5) The central motif is a cop-out.

Amplifying the no-tradeoffs fantasies of liberals who think that, for instance, millions of uninsured people can be covered with no additional cost being borne by anybody else, or that limitless welfare can’t possibly depress people’s ability to scale the economic ladder to the middle class, Katniss almost never has to do anything really nasty -- even though she’s a contestant in a fight to the death.

In Catching Fire, though we meet several of the other contestants in the Hunger Games TV event, Katniss doesn’t have to kill any of them except the evil ones. Instead, they simply die off, sacrifice themselves or kill each other.